RE: RE: What about the journals?

That's an interesting question, Kim. I'll be interested to see Bosch et al's response to it.

However, FWIW, here are my thoughts. I think it's going to depend very much on the specifics of the case. On the whole, it's not the job of peer reviewers to police fraud. They need to assume that the paper given to them to review is written in good faith. Their job is to see if the paper makes sense scientifically. If it's all internally consistent, but fraudulent, there's probably no realistic way for a peer reviewer to know that, and I wouldn't want to blame the peer reviewer in that case.

However, there may be things that peer reviewers ought to be able to spot. If a paper reports the results of a clinical trial and doesn't mention adverse events (BTW, it's worth mentioning in passing that there is some evidence that papers written with the help of professional medical writers are more likely to report adverse events [1]), a peer reviewer needs to ask the questions about what the adverse events were. Similarly, if peer reviewers spot something about the results that just doesn't ring true, then I think they have a duty to report those concerns to the editor for further investigation.

References:

1. Jacobs A. Adherence to the CONSORT guideline in papers written by professional medical writers. The Write Stuff 2010;19:196-200

RE: RE: RE: What about the journals?

Yes, I agree that medical journals should do a better job and actively spotting suspicious articles. For instance, imagine a multicenter clinical trial published in a top journal, that only lists as authors 7 renowned scientists who are experts in that field. Nobody else, just the famous ones. I would definitely mark the manuscript as suspicious at the time of submission.

In fact, I wonder whether other people should be named as defendants: what about the passive stance of public agencies, research councils, universities? P

Peer-reviewers are commonly asked by journals to report possible misconduct for the manuscript they are reviewing. Since I argue that ghostwriting linked to guest authorship is a major form of research misconduct, like FFP, reviewers should do the same with potentially ghostwritten papers and let editors know